One of the key trends in the automotive industry in 2013 is the desire of carmakers to get into apps, and app-makers to get into cars. Fertile ground for partnerships like the one announced at Mobile World Congress between Ford and Spotify.

Carmaker meets digital music service isn't a new phenomenon: in the US, Ford already has Pandora, iHeartRadio, Slacker, Rhapsody, Mog and Amazon's Cloud Player service working on its Sync AppLink platform, which enables drivers to control smartphone apps using their voice and/or dashboard controls.

Its Spotify deal – the first automotive partnership for the Swedish company – comes with a European twist that will see Ford's EcoSport become its first Sync-equipped car to be sold in Europe later in 2013. Ford is planning to have Sync in 3.5m cars in Europe by 2015, too.

"This relationship was a year and a half in development," said Doug VanDagens, Ford's global director of its connected services solutions organisation, in an interview with The Guardian shortly after the announcement.

"With both Sync and AppLink coming to Europe for the first time this year, we wanted to have a great partner. We've been pursuing them, because of their leadership position. They're the leader for streaming music in active subscriptions, paid subscriptions and number of countries, so it's a good deal for us."

The new app is impressive, with voice control working very well for navigating playlists, skipping between tracks and triggering artist-based radio stations – well enough to show how a voice-controlled Spotify could work in the home too, in fact.

Spotify's global head of hardware partnerships Pascal de Mul said that his team focused on making the app quick and intuitive to use in-car, while adding the odd feature – like a single "Road Trip" playlist that drivers can add tracks to by speaking.

This is all part of Ford's push for its AppLink initiative, complete with its own developer program announced at the CES show in January.

Since then, more than 2,500 developers have signed up to make their apps compatible with Ford's system, and the company is looking for more in Europe to join Spotify and three other apps – Kaliki, Glympse and Aha – as locally-developed apps for the European launch of Sync.

As in the US, Ford will review every app created by external developers for quality and safety. The company also says it will appoint a "recommended mobile app development house" to work with developers in Europe, and also to create an app cataloguing Sync-capable smartphone apps, to help drivers find them.

Ford also announced at CES that it was making AppLink open source, so rival carmakers can use the platform too. It's too early to tell how many will, but VanDagens said he was hopeful that pragmatism will dictate that they do – as well as pressure from app developers and digital services.

"The developer community has told us that a lot of these other platforms are really hard to interface with," said VanDagens. "We empathise with them, so we're opening up this very proprietary technology. Since we announced in January we've got three OEMs that are actively working with us."

VanDagens also talks enthusiastically about Ford jumping into hackathons with Spotify, to see what developers can create with its SDK in a matter of hours, let alone days or weeks.

"We've been working with people like Spotify since 2008, and we realised we have a lot to learn from them," he said. "The number of smartphones versus smartphone-enabled cars is really out of proportion."

That's why AppLink is so focused on people plugging in their own smartphones, rather than embedding everything into the dashboard itself, including a modem. "The average development cycle of a car is three years, then it lives for eight years," said VanDagens.

"The last thing we want to do is take one of the coolest pieces of technology now and make people live with it for the next 13 years, although that's what some of our competitors are doing. Embedded modems have their place for things like door unlock and remote-start, but for things like music and entertainment, news and navigation, you want to bring the very latest technology into the car with you."

Music is an obvious choice for apps that work with cars, but what other areas is Ford keen for developers to focus on? VanDagens cited "core services", by which he meant entertainment, navigation and some forms of productivity.

"We don't encourage incremental activity in spaces that people aren't normally engaged in in the car," he said. "We've had people wanting to have auctioning or internet search apps, but we've always reserved the right to focus on automotive services that aren't distracting."

Unsurprisingly, given their partnership, Mul praised Ford's platform, especially as the way AppLink works means Spotify can update its app whenever it likes. Apparently not the case with some other carmakers.

"The software cycle is allowed to spin at a faster rate than the hardware cycle," he said. "Some other companies are trying to force software companies into the same update cycle as the hardware."